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> The purpose of qualified immunity is to permit officials to carry out their discretionary duties without fear of personal liability or harassing litigation.

• austincheney 6y ago
  Sure it does. I don’t want paramedics prematurely giving up on saving peoples lives because there is fear of a lawsuit. Software developers don’t have this fear, so we get to kill people through releasing buggy bloated applications without any fear of personal liability.
  • ramphastidae 6y ago
    Pure nonsense. Cite these cases where software engineers have built a decades-long track record of abusing power and murdering innocents under the guise of civil service and directly abusing qualified immunity to get away with it. Or maybe tone things down.
    • Workaccount2 6y ago
      You can't even do that for civil servants though. The actual number of "encounters gone wrong" vs total encounters is vanishingly small. People think there is an epidemic of police murdering minorities, but in reality the number of unarmed black men killed by police is somewhere between bear attacks and babies drowning in buckets in terms of annual deaths. That's not to downplay the horror of such killings, but to put it into perspective of the pervasiveness of the problem. The media and especially social media of turned it into a full blown public health crisis.
      • openasocket 6y ago
        I think you're underestimating the problem by limiting it to unarmed black men killed by police. There's a lot that a police force can do besides killing people. There's profiling and unlawful arrests and prosecution, cruel and unusual punishments in prisons and jails, along with general harassment. You should look at the results of DOJ investigations into the Ferguson and Baltimore police departments, they are absolutely scathing. In the Baltimore police department, there were incidents in which they arrested people just hanging out on a street corner for no reason (when they told their lieutenant they didn't have a valid reason to arrest them they were told "just make something up") in front of the DOJ investigators! I'd also recommend the book "Just Mercy" for examples of the horrors of malicious prosecution. Just one egregious example from that book: a mentally disabled woman was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of her child. The problem? The woman never had a child, and was in fact infertile!
      • mindslight 6y ago
        Justice isn't based on probabilities, but rather addressing every single crime. If I were to come up with a novel way of committing murder, that doesn't mean I can carry it out and expect to be ignored because such events are rare. Every time a uniform wearing criminal escapes justice due to corruption is its own injustice, regardless of how uncommon it is when compared with all police interactions.
      • anaerobicover 6y ago
        > the number of unarmed black men killed by police is somewhere between bear attacks and babies drowning in buckets in terms of annual deaths. You're comparing accidents to murder¹. We can and should try to prevent deaths from bear attacks. But we should also have higher standards for human behavior than for bears. --- ¹Or at best manslaughter
    • austincheney 6y ago
      Perhaps that is data people should be tracking but aren't, which doesn't indicate an absence of such concerns.
  • runako 6y ago
    > Software developers don’t have this fear We should. A software engineer was one of a handful of people sentenced in the Volkswagen emissions scandal.
    • landemva 6y ago
      It was fraud, and submission of false documents to further their conspiracy. There was code involved, to further the fraud. Not a hapless software dev.
      • runako 6y ago
        Correct, and the push for accountability in police work isn't about punishing hapless officers. It's about creating some mechanism by which offenders like Chauvin can effectively be sanctioned in civil courts.
• koheripbal 6y ago
  Yes, but certain groups of people who's job it is to confront people in the public are the recipients of orders of magnitude more complaints than the average individual. The legal system is unfortunately set up such that there is a significant burden (time and cost) on defendants, even when cases are brought without merit. In that way, the legal system can be "weaponized" and public employees can be influenced to act a certain way under the threat of a sea of PERSONAL lawsuits. ...something that seldom happens to individuals. For that reason, immunity was created. I think we'll see a very sharp increase in lawsuits as a result of this change. ...and a lot of resignations. I wouldn't be a police officer if I didn't have immunity. At the very least, I would refuse to work shifts/neighborhoods with high crime.
  • Ceezy 6y ago
    If you are a private security agent for a mall what's the difference with a cop patrolling a mall? In sectors where private compete with public that's very difficult to understand why people should be regulated by different laws.
    • koheripbal 6y ago
      People doing their jobs and receive training should be personally immune from legal liability. That liability should be held by their employer. ...which is generally how it works, though it's not as strongly codified as it is with qualified immunity. If you're saying we should expand qualified immunity, I agree.
      • rdtwo 6y ago
        The problem comes when the people doing their jobs are also abusing their power for personal gain or vendetta and can’t be punished.
      • dragonwriter 6y ago
        > People doing their jobs and receive training should be personally immune from legal liability. That liability should be held by their employer. They aren’t, outside of government-agent immunities. > ...which is generally how it works, though it's not as strongly codified as it is with qualified immunity No, it is not how it works. The idnividual agent is generally personally liable, but the employer generally is often also liable for the torts of its agents under the principle of respondeat superior, or more directly if it also checks all the boxes for having committed a tort without considering that principle.